Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and John Edwards have joined …

Who knew so many people actually cared about early-stage presidential debates? The Internet has officially graduated from "abuzz" to "atwitter" over the issue as a new group of politicians and bloggers came out in favor of making the debate video available through a Creative Commons attribution license.

The issue caught fire after MSNBC's debate contract emerged, and the American public learned that the network was prohibiting all Internet redistribution and was also trying to control use of the footage by other television networks. Even before the contract details leaked, however, Lawrence Lessig of Stanford spearheaded a letter campaign directed at the Democratic and Republican National Committees. The goal is to get all the debate footage freely available for linking and remixing under either a Creative Commons license or as a public domain release.

New on the list of supporters is Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), whose letter to the DNC points out that the request does nothing to change copyright law. "The letter does not propose some radical change in copyright law, or an unjustified expansion in 'fair use'," says the letter. "Instead, it simply asks that any purported copyright owner of video from the debates waive that copyright." John Edwards also sent a letter, as did Republican bloggers like Matt Margolis, who heads up "Blogs for Bush."

The two parties have yet to support the requests, though the growing pressure may soon make this inevitable. While the letters have so far targeted the political parties, they might just as well be directed at the networks were making the contract requests in the first place. Edwards' letter, in fact, went out to a host of media executives in addition to the DNC, telling them that "commercial constraints are severe enough in their effects of diluting the substance of our campaigns. Limiting access to long-form televised debates makes matters worse."